We have been making rather a lot of window thingies. Well, technically, I have been folding things like a mad creature, while Hero menaces tissue paper and glue. They are quite addictive, though, these things – I so love looking at the colours with the sun coming through the window, and anything which reminds me to look outside, that the world will not always be covered either in rain or in mud, can only be a good thing. (I shouldn’t say this, really, given that the last three days have brought bright winter sunshine and crackling starry nights.)

Hero has a new coat, and pink and purple boots made for her by the very lovely shoemaker in Exeter. Her choice of colours, which was nice. The buckles are a complete sod, it must be said, but ultimately they are lovely boots, and how many people get to choose not only the colours but the style of their shoes, from a virtually limitless list of suggestions? If you can’t do it when you’re three and a half, then when?

Our newest familiar, Hecate, is settling in well. Wixon is, shall we say, quite taken with her.

The aforementioned winter sunshine. Good, isn’t it?

Both the heart-shaped casserole (full of rice pudding, a rather unlikely favourite of mine of late; sadly I am alone in this as neither Hero nor Quercus can be persuaded of its divinity) and the cow coffee pot visible in the background are things which make my heart sing whenever I spot them.

My ridiculous magpie-like love of shiny colourful things took over when I saw this sling (a Girasol Earthy Rainbow, if you’re interested) for a very good price indeed. We have bought next to nothing new for Mirth; it seemed nice that she should have a sling to herself, given how much use it’s going to get!

Our bedroom, post-transformation. Look! A ceiling! Which stays up and everything! Not particularly neat at the moment and covered in baby-related paraphernalia, but the room is blissful, and I am quite in love with the increasing quantities of wood which are becoming visible in our house. (Not least as their presence means the roof is not about to join us for afternoon tea.)

Mirth, aptly named both here and in real life, sporting a rather fetching bib and velvety suit passed on to us by some very lovely friends.

Mirth investigating this whole sitting malarky. Note also Pink Mousey, who looks like Sniff of Moomin fame, and who was sent to us by the lovely L-Q-S.

Mad hair and mad exploits with a new puzzle house and a plethora of animals. Hero’s ‘farm’ now includes – but is not limited to – a camel, a fox, a wolf and a wild boar. She is quite the connoiseur.

Such a smiley baby, it is just not true. Also, note plumptious legs – this babe is already nearly 20 lb! That explains all those night-feeds, then…

Star lights on shelves of jars with various bits and bobs. Including plastic reindeer. As you do.

It’s February already, somehow. Mirth will be six months old on the tenth of the month, and, in between sanding and waxing a Stokke highchair bought for £20 at an advent fair, I am wondering how on earth she can on the verge of joining us for dinner, yet her careful attentive watching as she sits on one or other of us while we eat assures me that she is, as does her poise when sitting and her reaching hands as she sees glasses and cutlery move. January has been a difficult month – one of those where everything goes wrong – and we are still finding our feet in its wake, but Mirth and Hero provide me with daily joy, genuine glee, at having two such bright souls in my life. (Yes, even at 3 a.m.) So, I am reminding myself of the happy things as I reach for the strength, the persistence, to sort out all the irritations, the challenges, the oh-you-just-bloody-well-would-wouldn’t-yous. (Current tally: frozen pipes = no washing machine or dishwasher and only sporadic sink water; new washing machine as last one gave up; car breaking down intermittently since Christmas Eve because of a veg oil conversion; my car’s brakes decided to stop working properly due to Comedy French Wiring (a well-known term on sad-git car forums); sleep, the lack thereof; money, the lack thereof; hard-drive dependability, the lack thereof.)

And in less than two weeks, we begin the next phase of work on our house, and Mirth, Hero and I will be heading to West Sussex for a few weeks (anyone local, do say hello!), to stay with Quercus’s mother while Quercus takes ceilings and plaster down. As part of this, we are meeting a central heating engineer later on today; I am quite excited (though I’d be so more fully if I had worked out an infallible bank-robbery strategy first, given that we are probably looking at about six thousand pounds to do the sort of thing we need to do). Our pipes are frozen for the fourth year running today; we had a heating plan and a plumbing plan designed for us by ex-friend David, and basically the latter sucks and the former never materialised. So, we’re finally taking the bull by the proverbial and seeing if we can at least fix the heating problem. At the moment, we have a woodstove in the living room, and that’s it. What we’re hoping for is a larger stove (12kw or so) with a back boiler, and thus a radiator in the kitchen, a towel rail in the bathroom, and radiators in each of the bedrooms. Of course, our house being difficult and minute, it is a tricky job and the heights and levels are all wrong. But it would be so, so good to get this sorted once and for all – I would not miss the lakes which appear on our windowsills each morning, and nor would I miss the mould which forms when things get damp, and nor would I miss the searing heat we achieve in the living room combined with the chilling see-your-breath cold of the bedrooms.

Still to come: the saga of the Steinway piano sale (or not), the rice pudden recipe to end all rice puddens, and the fact that I appear to be sliding towards vegan cooking.

So, that’s where I am at the moment. Where are you, internets?

Isn’t it always the way that the weekend sees rain non-stop, and then Monday morning dawns bright and sunny?

Ho hum.

This weekend, Quercus has been trying to get back into the swing of working on our house. The current project is to get the garden work finished (as much as is seasonally possible) by the end of February; we have a block of time set aside for just this very thing, beginning on Friday, and Quercus’s mother is coming to lend an extra pair of hands, which is probably just as well given that this weekend saw me with the first twinges of a back pain suggestive of SPD.* So, Saturday was spent with the small girl and I pottering about the house, sorting out laundry (thrills! deep joy!) and house stuff, and pootling on the patio for tea-breaks with Quercus, who was otherwise engaged in making shelving for the workshop so we can get our tools and general shed paraphernalia sorted out, prior to doing more intensive work as the year goes on.

We’ve had a few weeks of not doing very much around the house, somehow. There are lots of things to do, of course, but somehow, the slump around Christmas just took a while to wear off… so that despite his having worked really hard for a week in early January, we still find ourselves with a list which includes many tasks identified quite a while ago. I think the thing is that it’s difficult to sustain a really brisk pace over a long period of time, particularly when you’re also working, living in a house which requires a lot of just ordinary cleaning and maintenance even to tread water domestically, and bringing up small children on top of that. So, from time to time we just sort of collapse into a small heap of lethargy. Well, I do, at least, and I’m not even the one doing the majority of it. (I like to think of myself as er, ahem, a facilitator.)

But as the weather improves – and we did get some sunshine on Saturday, albeit followed by gale-force winds and pissing rain – and the days lengthen, we remember that somehow, I am fifteen weeks into pregnancy, and before we know it, this whole managing-a-house-with-one-child-plus-jobs-and-renovation malarky will seem like child’s play as newborn chaos reigns and we find ourselves back on rations of sleep which are expressed in minutes with perfect validity. So, the things we’re going to do by the end of this month include:

•  laying the stepping-stone paths (we’re now thinking about using meaty cordwood rounds instead of paving slabs, simply because we can’t seem to find something we like and can afford, despite months and months of hunting) down to the bottom of the garden;

• finishing off the workshop and bringing the contents back from storage;

• rotovating what will be the lawn, which is the largest of our three terraces;

•  grass-seeding;

•  sticking in decent quantities of manure and topsoil where the new growing beds are going to be;

•  planting a few things!

•  clearing out the greenhouse;

•  sorting a waterbutt or two for the workshop;

• plugging gaps in the hedge where necessary.

This, of course, is only half the story – the other side of our garden, which is about the same size as this piece, is completely broken. It’s covered in a combination of a goodly-sized woodpile (which will one day be housed in the barn which Quercus will build for wood storage, but probably not until next year), building supplies and general crud, but we’re thinking sufficient unto the day and all that, so for this spring, it’s the kitchen garden, effectively, which we’re hoping to finish, so that we can then try to work out a way of sorting two of the four rooms in the original house. (For ‘sorting’, read ‘taking down the ceilings; stripping the walls of their crumbling plaster; working out minor details like woodwork, doorframes, cupboards, shelving; reinstating plaster, skirting boards, ceilings and so on’.)

It’s quite daunting, truth be told, and I’m struggling with the feeling of being unable to help beyond the facilitating bit. This is a bit of a recurring problem for me; I like to be in control (‘what? you!? Nooooooo.’) and not being able to be in control does not bring out the best in me. I like to make lists, and to tick things off, and to move swiftly on, and whatnot. And I just can’t, really, when it’s not me who’s doing the things on the list. And it’s not fair of me to want things to move more quickly, and I know that, and I know it’s not helping to chivvy, but oh. It is not easy to park a lifetime of twitchy must-try-harder mental habits.

So, I am hoping that Quercus and I can write a list together, so that I know what’s likely to happen when, and so that I don’t get unrealistic expectations of what might be possible. I can do things to help, of course, like making sure there is cake for a break with tea, and food for dinner which doesn’t take much thought, and enough to drink, and clean working clothes. I can ensure the small girl is happily occupied, and I can make sure that I’m eating well and taking care of myself so that I don’t enter that horribly emotional state which for me often goes with tiredness in pregnancy, meaning that Quercus can Just Get On With It without having to worry about how I’m doing, and whether I’m about to sprout snakes instead of hair. But I so so so wish that we just had pots of money, so that we could get someone to help us do this, so that we could wave a bit of a magic wand and just make some of the list go away, preferably with time enough to spare that the last months of this pregnancy might not be such a balancing act, such a divide-and-conquer approach to our time as the two adults in the house. When you’ve got limited funds, where is that point that decides you on prioritising just getting things done over keeping the small quantities of savings that you’ve accrued…? And did I mention that Quercus may be made redundant at some point in the coming months, as part of UK government cuts to the civil service? Let us not speak of that, actually – we knew that this was a possibility, and I’m hopeful that with careful management, we’ll do just fine. I prefer to be positive about these things, after all.

Friends have been talking to me since I said that I’m pregnant, telling me of the importance of networks, and of local friends upon whom one can rely for emergency childcare, cups of tea, bolt-holes. I do know this, of course, but it’s hard to cultivate these networks when you’re generally always occupied doing something, be it commuting from work or freelance editing or spending time with the small girl or debating paving slabs and heating solutions. I am trying, though, and I’m trying to find out about things like pre-school, and whether or not it is right for us, and other groups to occupy small people, and ways to manage my time which make household-running easier.

Sometimes I’d like to just be pregnant, you know? But then, does that ever happen, I wonder? Or is it just that most people seem to have children at a time in their lives when change is inevitable? Moving house, changing jobs, having other children to think about…?

So. There you go. And you? What are you up to on this (hopefully) sunny Monday morning?

* SPD – to those happy uninitiated readers, this is basically where the ol’ pregnancy hormones get a bit carried away, and your pelvis loosens, meaning that the joints aren’t terribly comfortable. Sometimes this means audible clicking, sometimes ‘just’ aches and pains. Sometimes it means hydrotherapy helps, and sometimes it means crutches. In my last pregnancy I had SPD from about 22 weeks, so it’s not particularly surprising that it may be thinking about starting a bit earlier this time. Tell you what, though: it can fuck right off.

It was Quercus’s birthday yesterday. I had smugly knitted him some wristwarmers, and I’d also managed to cajole the sewing machine into creating two pairs of pyjama bottoms for him. (Nice pyjamas for men seem to be a bit of a hen’s teeth thing, here at least, and after realising that anything approaching acceptable in fabric terms seemed to translate into sums of money which were anything but, I ordered some rather nice brushed cottons from the disturbingly cheap Croft Mill.) Much to my astonishment, the results are wearable, and quite appealing, and Quercus is either delighted with them, or a very good liar. (Let’s hope either state persists.) The complete works of the Mighty Boosh, a book about clouds, some Horace Silver and a ginger cake shaped like miniature gourds later, and I think it’s safe to say that this birthday was a good one. And that’s before I get started on the celebratory quince pie I made for afters, of which more anon. (I might also post the ginger cake recipe, as it was surprisingly successful given that I realised halfway through its concoction that I had run out of eggs, and Quercus was out, and the small girl was asleep upstairs, so my options were rather limited. Cue: the Inadvertantly Vegan Ginger Experience! Catchy name, no?)

We also managed a walk by the sea in the closing light of the afternoon; it was surprisingly calm, and the sun was just glorious, despite brief showers. It is extremely civilised living within a half-hour of lots of Jurassic coastline.

(Lengthy aside: the only slight fly in the ointment was that I appear to have picked up some evil chest infection thing. I didn’t really write much about this at the time, but last winter was officially not fun in terms of being ill. I think because we were getting so little consistent sleep (the small girl often waking several times a night, very rarely sleeping an entire night through and waking earlier than seemed strictly civilised), coupled with having rather a lot to do (work, house renovation, freelance stuff, childcare, the need to appear to be a functioning adult etc), my immune system just buggered off and left me to it, saying something along the lines of ‘well if you’re not going to have a holiday, I certainly am!’.

Result: 42 days of sick leave in one year.

Yes.

That’s FORTY-TWO DAYS. About a month of that was the point where my GP said ‘you need a break; here is a certificate for three weeks – kindly get some sleep and try to get yourself sorted as you have had TOO MANY ANTI-BIOTICS TO BE ENTIRELY SANE’. Obviously, it’s fair to say that the people I work with were not exactly delighted by this absence, and I felt utterly rubbish about it, not least because the whole time I was off, I felt terrible. Hacking cough, tentative adult-onset asthma diagnosis because of SO. MANY. INFECTIONS. The whole nine yards, and all that. Then, in the summer, the small girl seemed to hit her stride, and her sleep has been much, much more consistent since about May, overlooking teething and the odd glitch. As a result: one day off sick since then. Now, however, I’m worried that perhaps that diagnosis of asthma wasn’t as wide of the mark as I’d hoped; I thought that I just kept catching things, and they were ending up as chest infections because of those postcards from Rio that my immune system used to remind me of its existence. I picked up a cold last weekend, thought I’d cleared it, yet here I am, wheezy and tight-chested with a cough which sounds like that of a heavy smoker. I wish I could just crawl back into bed and stay there until Wednesday, but the thing is, I really, really don’t want to take more time off work. I’m into a new year now, as it were, and I don’t want to blot my copy-book so early in the winter. So, my plan is just to hope that it’ll bugger off shortly, leaving me fine and not wheezy and distinctly un-asthmatic. In the meantime, I’ve asked for an inhaler prescription. Woe. Woe is me. Anyone with tips for easing a wheezing chest (rhymes! see? recipes, pictures, AND RHYMES! Don’t say I never give you anything), please share.

Ahem.

Back to the birthday.

Quince pie. QUINCE PIE. In fact, QUINCE PIE!

Like this:

Runcible Pie

Take…

Filling:
3 large cooking apples;
2 quinces;
a very goodly sprinkling of sugar (for which read: half a truckload);

Pie itself:
about a pound of shortcrust pastry, i.e.
12 oz (in this case) self-raising flour (yes, I had run out of plain, and yes, I was determined anyway);
5 oz margarine/butter;
4 oz icing sugar;
enough cold water to form into a decent wodge of pastry.

Then…
First, bugger about assembling pastry while remembering fondly the days when your mother had A Mixer Which Did All This For You. Congratulate self on green nature of doing it by hand, and swig more sloe to ease cramp in hand. (That’s my excuse, anyway, and I am sticking to it.) Pastry sorted, stick in fridge to cool. Retrieve it after about twenty minutes (or, er, rather longer, if you completely forget about it while gorging yourself on quince pulp), and line an eight-inch greased pie dish with it, leaving about a third aside for the pie lid. I then blind-baked the case, as we had the oven on for dinner anyway, for about twenty minutes at 180°c.

Then peel, core and chop the apples and quinces, and pop them in a pan with about an inch of boiling water. I was amazed at the speed with which quinces discolour; two minutes after peeling, they were already very brown, so putting them in water as you go is probably the way forward. Cook them gently, lid on, for about twenty minutes, until the apple is completely pulpified and even the quince is looking a little mollified. Poke suspiciously at the quince, removing a small section with an inappropriately cumbersome utensil. Ingest said morsel, and come to terms with the need for SUGAR! yes, SUGAR! immediately. Turn head right way round and drink gallon of sloe wine to recover from after-effects of sourness. Bung in about eight tablespoons of sugar, stir until dissolved, and test, gingerly, sourness levels. Decide acceptable, and have at the lot with a masher, as the quinces don’t break down as much as the apple.

Pour the resulting gloop into the pie case, and whack on your rolled-out lid. Whole lot then goes in the oven for about another twenty-five minutes at 180°c.

THE QUINCES. I cannot stress the loveliness of the quinces.

Slaver, slaver.

Still to come: that vegan gingeriness, apple, grape and sage jelly, quince cheese and apple butter recipes, together with elderberry delight and quince cordials. Recipes, that is. (I will get those sodding 52 Recipes in 2010 done, dagnammit.)

And you? What has the weekend held for you?

Last week the small girl and I started experimenting with what I am ambitiously terming biodegradable Chrimbly decorations. For ‘biodegradable’, read ‘they will probably disintegrate long before they get within spitting distance of midwinter’. This, dear reader, is because they are made of dough. Squidgy, squashy dough. The first batch we made from cornflour clay, which goes like this:

1 c bicarbonate of soda;
2 c cornflour;
1c water;
essential oils to scent if you fancy it.

It has a pleasantly porcelain-like effect, courtesy of the cornflour; the ‘clay’ is very white, and slightly sparkly because of the bicarb, and it’s very smooth to roll out. Somehow that pristine whiteness is rather appealing, and it’s tough enough to withstand toddler poking without just falling apart.

We used cedarwood atlas oil to make it smell nice, and we had a good old bash at it with the rolling pins that La Que Sabe bought for the small girl, together with some Ikea cookie cutters.

After baking them (using up the heat after cooking dinner; took a couple of goes this way, but I didn’t fancy turning on the oven specifically to cook these little blighters, and hey, patience is a virtue [which I do not possess], OK?), we then had at them with some watercolour paints. You can see the basic white colour in the picture there, on the right; I almost wish now that I’d kept some of them white, because they do look rather pretty in a sort of pared-down way. Of course, pared-down is not, perhaps the most obvious watch-word for my, er, style, if you can call it that. Ahem. (That probably explains the explosion-in-firework-factory end result.)

Turns out that the little blocks of watercolour work very well for this sort of thing, though I’d thought they wouldn’t give a dense enough colour. Certainly, some of the ones that the small girl did on her own were quite wash-like, colour-wise, but variety is the spice of life, right? Plus, I have been genuinely alarmed previously by sessions involving tubes of paint – the paint! it goes so fast! you can virtually hear the coins chinking! This is how they turned out:

As they’re still only flour, really, and water, I think we’ll probably dip them in some sort of varnish or hard oil soon, to try to keep them for as long as possible, though I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how hardy they are, at least for now – we dropped several during the painting session, on to our slate kitchen floor, and not a one broke, despite being (I would have thought) a reasonably fragile shape.

We’ve made up some saltdough since then; the resulting stars are drying out as I speak. The dough is a creamy colour with small flecks in (courtesy of having used up part of a rather damp bag of wholewheat flour), and I’ve added lemon juice and sunflower oil to make it (apparently) more malleable when being worked and harder when dry. The basic recipe I used was this:

2 c plain flour;
1 c salt;
1 c water;
1 tbsp oil;
a good squeeze of lemon juice.

Again, the stars are getting a quick cooking here and there after dinner, and other than that, I’m leaving them to dry out by the woodburner. (Talking of which, we had our second frost of the year last night – everything was glittering with a dusting of powdery ice this morning, and very pretty it was too.) I think we’ll probably try the watercolours again afterwards, though I have also got some acrylic gold paint, which I wondered about just rubbing on by hand around the edges or somesuch arty-farty nonsense.

In other news, it’s Quercus’s birthday on Saturday. (‘Daddy’s burfday! Candles! Cake! Sing ‘happy buuuuuuurfday!’) Predictably, I have left sorting out his presents until the eleventh-and-a-halfth hour, partly because I am horribly disorganised of late, and partly because he hasn’t been going to his sodding rehearsals (he plays in two local orchestras, which should – note should – mean he’s out for two evenings a week, leaving me free reign of craftiness galore, but they’ve had a lot of sectional sessions, and as he plays a stupid instrument brass instrument which isn’t always needed, that’s meant a lot of missed crafty time, dagnammit).  This means that the last week or so has found me beggaring about in a feverish frenzy of I-can’t-say-because-he-reads-this-blog, and tonight, when he departs – finally! – for a rehearsal, will be no exception. Let us just say that there may be baking involved. Recipes and whatnot to follow shortly.

And in still other news, I am rather excited to be doing a parcel swap of goodies with the lovely Nadine, who lives in Prague and thus, it seems, has access to all sorts of striped delights of a tightly-sock nature. I really love finding out about people who come here and read the blathering idiocy that I inflict on the webly waves; it tickles me all sorts of puce to learn that someone reads this blog while eating breakfast as I am going to bed at night (hello, Nettles!), or that they too are interested in a cob hot tub run off wood (hello Canadian person whose name escapes me but which may have been – nope – sorry – it’s gone; please remind me if you’re still out there).

So. In the manner of the Spanish inquisition, who are you, where are you reading from, and what pearls of wisdom, crafty* or otherwise, have you to share on this bright frosty morning (here)? And would anyone else fancy doing a small parcel swap, goodies from deepest darkest Devon to… well, anywhere, really? I do love sending and receiving things in the post. There is something about unwrapping actual, physical parcels which makes me think of The Box of Delights and steam trains. Scrum-diddly-umptious. (Sorry. I don’t know what came over me there. Blame it on the brown wrapping paper.)

*After the stars fest, we are now looking for something else to do, craft-wise, which suits small fingers but gives big fingers something to do too. Recent hits have included wax rubbings of leaves and various baking bits. Any suggestions welcome.

It’s no good – I’m still feeling a bit down in the dumps. Last night I ended up ranting about lost dungarees (two pairs thereof), a lost hat (which I knitted, last winter, and which I’m very attached to, not least as it’s the first hat I managed which really worked, and it involved Noro yarn), general housework dudgeon, and the overwhelming feeling of never managing to finish anything.

To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.

ARGH.

I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.

The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.

Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.

So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.

I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.

So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.

And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?

I’m thinking of switching to having the date for my post titles; you know how it is – some mornings, you just can’t assemble your random thoughts into the sort of order which a single title would cover, this being just one of those. Maybe I could add subtitles. Or is that too complicated?

Anyway.

Firstly, I’ve managed to whack my way through another ten or so new recipes in recent weeks, meaning I’ve got the smallest glimmer of a hope of completing 52 recipes in 2010. This weekend, we tried a lemon and lentil soup (v. g.), killer peanut butter fudge cookies (so good I am lusting after them now, at a distance of ten miles), and a mushroom and nut loaf which was really rather excellent. All keepers, definitely.

Secondly, our workshop now has a roof. Well, it has a protective layer of stuff fastened down with battening; the stuff can be a roof in its own right for three months, but within that time it will gain its fircone-like shingling, meaning it just becomes a part of the belt-and-braces approach to weatherproofing which Quercus has opted for with this project. The waney-edged boards arrive soon, so the walls will be clad, and before we know it, we’ll be reclaiming our stuff from a neighbour’s garage and there’ll be one less element of chaos to cope with. (At the moment, Quercus’s car forms a mobile shed – the boot is full of circular saws, chainsaws and brushcutters. As you do.)

Thirdly, Quercus’s mother departs the province today, after a stay of ten days. It’s been OK-ish – we had several near-misses in terms of open warfare when she wouldn’t leave something alone (to wit: ambitions for life, jobs, babies, childcare, living without money, What The Neighbours Think Of Us and The Situation With My Father), but it could have been worse, and by my standard measure of success (no-one died) we passed with flying colours. That said, the sheer quantity of time we’ve spent with her this year has made me think a bit. We’ve all found it really difficult having her about for so long – probably eight weeks this year – in part because we are ungrateful fuckpigs, but mostly because she is genuinely the most difficult person to get on with that I have ever met, which, coupled with extremely irritating personal habits (‘Morning Has Broken’, out of tune, ad nauseum, at six-thirty in the morning would be hard to take for anyone, I think, as would the continual use of ‘spend a penny’ when you go near a bathroom – woman, you are GOING FOR A WEE, like anyone normal), bring us close to the brink every time we’re together, and, what’s more, our normal tolerance levels haven’t really recovered from her first visit, back in March, letalone the recent and prolonged blows-upon-a-bruise visitations.

We have fallen into the habit of asking her to visit at Christmas, preferring to take our medecine at the start of the time off we get rather than for the New Year. We have yet to actually articulate this invitation this year, and she will shortly be off to Canada for about three weeks, meaning we’re going to have a longer break than we’ve so far enjoyed from each others’ company (because I’m sure we piss her off as much as she does us), so I wondered if we ought to get it in before she goes. But then… At the moment, the idea of her coming here at Christmas fills me with dread.

The thing is, while I can tolerate her, and manage her, and, with the odd flash of white rage, bite back the things I’d like to say (while restraining my arm from its murderous fumbling for the nearest heavy object) and so on, Quercus finds it much, much harder. She makes him so cross that he sometimes physically removes himself and goes for a very irritable walk, just to wear off the anger. He rants, nightly, about the many ways in which she is impossible. Worse than that, his relationship with her makes him feel immensely guilty: that he doesn’t get on with her better, than he isn’t more forthcoming when she’s around, that he can’t be himself with her, that he knows that NOT being himself probably makes it worse, that he can’t bring himself to be the person to whom he thinks she would react better, that he longs for her departure as soon as she arrives, that she tries very hard to help us, both physically and financially, that she can be very thoughtful yet still he feels as he does.

I feel a few of these guilts myself – she does a lot to help us, and she’s the only member of our joint families who does (though lordy me, when someone reminds you of this and actively asks you for thanks or praise, it doesn’t help, does it?). But the thing I feel mostly is that I worry that every time she comes to see us for a significant event, that significant event gets rained on slightly. The small girl’s second birthday was a good case in point – she was vile about something-or-other, and we had a very tense few hours while she got over whatever it was that had caused the vileness. Last Christmas she was so rude the very first evening she arrived that Quercus determined to ask her to leave if she hadn’t cheered the fuck up by the following morning. Does it always have to be like this? Apparently so. I’ve taken to challenging her head-on about the things she does, sometimes, i.e. ‘we seem to be at loggerheads here; have I said something to upset you?’ Sometimes this works, sometimes it causes only teenage flouncing.

It’s been better, though not unfailingly so, since the small girl arrived. Prior to her appearance, most visits included at least two threats to go home, while we are now down to a batting average of one or so, with only moderate use of guilt thrown in. So far, she has only taken her irritation with us out on the small girl once or twice, and she has only done something which we felt was openly not a good idea once, when she was trailing a small child, howling, up and down the lane to the car, to pack her things, rather than waiting ten minutes so that one of us could take over and she could just get on. The small girl didn’t understand what she’d done to warrant being pulled about, chided and ignored in equal parts; the simple answer was that we had asked her grandma to look after her when her grandma hadn’t wanted to, and it would have been rather easier if said grandma had just said no – the resulting child meltdown took far longer to sort out than we’d gained in child-free time.

It’s a difficult thing, letting the dynamic between the small girl and her grandma evolve without stepping in too often. I don’t want the small girl to pick up the habits of her grandma’s which drive us to distraction, and nor do I want her to see how annoying we find the woman. I had no relationship with my grandparents – two dead, two uninterested – and I do want my daughter to have a better sense of where she comes from, of her wider family, than I had; two people did not form a big enough support network when my mother died, and I have never felt more keenly the lack of siblings near my own age, or grandparents, or uncles and aunts, than I did at that time. But are irritating people better than no people at all? Sometimes, I am not sure. It’s a sort of ‘if you can’t be with the one you love…’ scenario, really. And the small girl does love her grandma, despite her quixotic nature. I suppose I just hope that she comes to see how irritating she can be (thus maintaining our sanity!) but loves her nonetheless, with the distance of a generation, with more ease than we have managed.

And in the meantime, here I am, busily contemplating pregnancy and babies and how that would alter our family as it stands, and what role Quercus’s mother would have in that shift. It’s a bit sticky, frankly. I still long for the huge family dinners, with ten people crammed around a ridiculously small table, or Sunday mornings with fourteen children of varying ages destroying the counters while assembling a very sugary breakfast, or midweek evenings with the stove lit and lots of people watching something entertaining on DVD, or winter walks with several dogs, a few antiquated relatives trailing sticks about the place and a riot of children poking streams, chasing cats and generally being beastly. Fun. Friendship. Respect. Laughter.

I don’t know that there is an answer to The Problem of Families, and Relatives In General, is there? Except one involving wood alcohol, anyway.

Anyway. On to less sticky things. Or not, as the case may be.

Lemon and Lentil Soup
Get hold of…
3 potatoes, diced
2 carrots, chopped
2 chopped onions
A goodly wodge of garlic, chopped
A slug of olive oil
A generous handful of herbs (parsley, sage, oregano, basil – whatever comes to hand)
A large mug of lentils
About a pint and a half of water
A stockcube
3 mugs of spinach/chard/sorrel/greens of some sort you can’t quite identify, which probably won’t kill you
The juice of two lemons, squished rather inefficiently with your hands
A spot of salt and pepper

Then…
Into the pan with the onions, garlic, carrots and taters, and fry them in the oil for a bit, until they start to capitulate. Whop in the lentils, water, herbs and stockcube, stick on a lid and boil it all up until the potatoes soften, at which point, in go spinach and lemon juice for another ten minutes or so. Make sure it’s all cooked through; take off the heat; blend to avoid wierdly stringy bits of spinach in soup context, which would be Just Wrong.

Cookies and nut loaf to follow.

So. After that depressing little wander through the familial labyrinth, tell me nice happy things (including the recipe for healing such maternal discord) this instant, gentle reader, in the box of commentage below.

I’m mid-camera change at the moment, and have thus yet to do battle with the outgoing camera in order to try to extricate some pictures from its grubby mits, but I just wanted to say how very exciting it is to watch our workshop coming together at last. It’s about two years or so since we worked out detailed plans for where it would go and how it would be built, and now, watching it actually take shape, I realise how nice it’s going to be. It’s not quite your average shed in that it’s HUGE, and so far its frame has been put together using free and recycled wood. Eventually, it’s going to have waney-edged boards for walls (the planks of wood with the curved edges of the tree left in place) and shingles (wooden tiles) for a roof; it’s a very Quercus structure, in short.

Yesterday we* clambered about on it, putting up the first two roof trusses, and slotting the beam which forms the apex into place. Ridge pole, I believe. It was interesting; there were Very Big Nails involved, and a lot of up-and-down, but very little swearing or getting cross; Quercus and I work pretty well together, and fortunately I don’t seem to drive him quite as demented as his mother does, which is reassuring. I’ve got pictures of various stages of it thus far; the floor supports are in place, and the walls’ studwork, and now two of the zillions of roof trusses are up – the overall impression is of an ark, frankly.

The bark is still on part of the wood because it came free from a local sawmill, so hadn’t been processed because they wanted to get rid of it. We’re going to treat it to help it remain solid against the wet Devon weather, but the wood chaps estimate it should last for twenty years or more even untreated.

That green amorphous blob is the table saw, hiding under a dumpy bag because the weather, despite the blue skies here, has been so unpredictable for the last month or so that you just never know when it’s going to tip it down suddenly… Gives an idea of scale, too – the apex is about eleven feet up.

See what I mean about the ark-like quality? It’s even more this way now that all the roof trusses are in place; more pictures to follow now that I am once more be-camerad.

In other news, pumpkins. Well, specifically, Hooligans. Quercus’s mother has grown a packet of these, and brought down a large bag of the upshot, which is to say, about ten little pumpkins of a most aesthetically pleasing nature. I chopped the lids off, whipped out the seeds and that odd stringy bit in which pumpkins seem to specialise, and in went a rather pleasant combination of cheese, lentils, beans and brown rice.

I’m hoping they keep well; we have another five or so to go, and next time I’m wondering about a nut, mushroom and brown rice thing for the stuffing business…

Stuffed pumpkins
Ingredients
Some pumpkins (!)
An onion or two
A large lump of cheese
About a mugful of lentils
About a mugful of beans, barley, split peas – whatever comes to hand, pulses-wise, really
Quite a lot of garlic
About a mugful of brown rice
Some herbs – I used basil, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano
A slosh of Tabasco
A stockcube
A couple of eggs

Then…
Boil up everything bar the pumpkins, the eggs and the cheese in a large pan, using enough water to mean the end result is a sticky-ish stodge, rather than something needing draining – you want to eat all those herby bits and bats, rather than watching them disappear down the plughole. When you’re sure the pulses aren’t going to poison anyone, remove said pan from the heat and grate in the cheese. When the resulting even-more-sticky mass has cooled a bit, mix in the eggs.

Carve off lids for the pumpkins and take out the seedy bit. I stabbed the sides a few times because, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and dobbed a little bit of butter on the edges here and there before filling the cavity with the cheesy lentil mixture and putting the lid back on. (Because I am greedy of a generous disposition, the lids were more sort of squodged on top than actually replaced, but this, I found, led to an agreeably crunchy collar of cheesy loveliness around the edge of the lid when cooked.) Pop the filled pumpkins on a tray, with a tablespoon or two of water to help the skins cook, and a few little dots of butter on their lids. Cook them at about 180°c for about an hour; they went very nicely with some opportunist baked taters, and some steamed courgettes. Having only encountered pumpkin in either a soup or a pie context prior to this, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it tasted quite strongly, and that its texture was rather like potato; I’d thought the filling would serve largely to disguise something a tad on the unspeakable side.

After this, a nice sit-down and a cup of tea is called for, as is a large slice of tiffin, which became my poor-man’s-Rocky Road yesterday when I realised that I simply wasn’t going to find proper marshmallows, as opposed to the ghastly Flump-style aberrations. So, I took this route:

Tiffin
Wossinit?
100g dark chocolate
2 tbsp honey
100g butter
A large pinch of cinnamon
A drop of Angostura bitters
About half a mug of sultanas
About half a mug of roasted walnuts
100g ginger biscuits, with a few digestives thrown in because I could

So…
Melt the chocolate, honey and butter together; I tend to ignore that whole ‘gently’ malarky and just blast the bastard in the microwave because I have no patience, and so far it’s worked just fine. When you’ve got a gorgeous silky mix of chocolate with which you’d quite like to just retire quietly to the shadows, spoon in hand, resist this temptation, and take out the resulting frustration on those biscuits, damn them. Pop them in a small bag and bash the blighters until they are fine crumbs. (Take that, you… you… biscuit!) Add in the nuts (I think pine nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or really anything crunchy would work equally well) and the sultanas (which, likewise, you could replace with any sort of dried fruit you fancied, I should imagine), and then pour on the melted chocolate mixture. Mix it all in thoroughly, then turn it out into a 20cm square tin you’ve lined with something like foil or baking paper (which makes for a rather easier turning-out manoeuvre later on) and stick it in the fridge to set. When you want to cut it into pieces (assuming you get that far), whip it out and let it warm up a tad so it doesn’t crack when you cut it, and bingo: chocolatey stickiness of a rather pleasant, deeply un-labour-intensive nature.

So, pictures of woody bits to follow, and also of pumpkins, in theory, at least. Anyone got any other pumpkin recipes worth sharing? I’d love to see my pumpkin prejudices trounced once and for all.

* For once, not the Royal We which means Quercus, but both of us; positioning timber which is that heavy is simply not possible single-handed unless you have better access to your site, and probably quite a few lengths of rope for levering things.

This last weekend, we realised that it had been some months since we’d had a proper day out which didn’t involve calling into a DIY shop of some sort, or going to visit someone who might be getting rid of indecent quantities of timber, or genearlly ferreting out something to do with building/demolishing/re-rendering some part of our vast empire. So, we determined to rectify this sorry state of affairs forthwith, and buggered off to Cornwall for a proper miniature holiday. You know: like a real holiday, but, er, shorter. And without accommodation. Or, in fact, being away for more than, um, a day. But still – a change is as good as a whatsit, and all that, and a change we did indeed manage.

The morning we spent getting lost finding our way to Pencarrow, a large stately house between Bodmin and Camelford, while the rain attempted to move from spitting to tipping. We realised about an hour’s drive from home that we’d come out armed to the teeth with a full change of clothes for the small girl, food, drinks, a flask, a nappy-changing bag and even a spare pair of shoes and jeans for me, but we’d completely forgotten coats for ourselves; fortunately, Camelford smiled on us, and a charity shop provided a fleece for Quercus while a hardware shop had a surprising range of lightweight rainproof jackets. We managed a picnic – despite having forgotten mayonnaise or butter for our otherwise bare bread – under overcast skies and walnut trees laden with green bombs, and the Pencarrow peacocks are as lovely as I remember them being when I went there as a child.

From Pencarrow we went to Boscastle, for a walk on the cliffs, around the valley, and through the village itself, for most of which the small girl slept in the sling on my back, waking just in time for tea and scones at a riverside eatery. Her initiation into the greatest of British traditions, fish and chips, took place later in the evening, at long past small-person bedtime o’clock; one of my enduring memories of this time will be of us sitting on the giant breakwater on the beach at Westward Ho (!), passing chips and morsels of fish to a small girl wrapped tightly in her father’s fleece, while she grinned at the wind in her hair and commented on seagulls approaching.

It’s astonishing the difference that one day off can make. We’ve all felt a bit like new people since Saturday, and we’ve all been much happier for it. There’s always something we should be doing, or somewhere we should be tidying, or something that could do with a wash/change/paint/sand/drill, and it’s not that everyday life hasn’t got lots of carrotty lovelinesses of its own, of course, but rather that sometimes, in order to appreciate them, it helps to be able to view them from a distance, I find; the carrots of proper daytrips are thus many and varied, in that you have a good day out, which is a carrot in its own right, but then you have the side-effect carrot of recognising your daily life carrots too. Gosh. What a lot of carrots.

We have determined to make these days off, these steppings-out from our daily lives, a more frequent happening, if only to give us time and space to remember how good our life together is, and how lucky we are to live as we do, in a place we love (even if it does drive us demented sometimes), with people who make us happy (and, er, demented).

So, talking of carrots, which we weren’t, really… I’ve been at the 52 Recipes malarky again, with the following:

Saffron-braised carrots with broad bean pilaf

Ingredients
For the carrots:
About eight large carrots, chopped as you fancy
A large pinch of saffron
A mug of veggie stock
A large onion, peeled and chopped
A generous sprinkling of cumin, coriander, parsley and thyme
A rather more timid sprinkling of Tabasco
Giant wodges of chopped garlic, so indecent in quantity as to make numbers futile
A slug of olive/sunflower oil

Then…
Basically, sling the lot in a pan, bring to the boil, and simmer for about twenty minutes or so, lid on in an attempt not to curry the entire house. (Or, you know, curry away: I myself quite like the smell of tandoori pillows at bedtime.) (I think some chard or spinach would add to this rather well, and possibly some potatoes too.  Otherwise it is rather… carrotty.)

For the pilaf:
A mug of broad beans
A large mug of brown rice
2 red onions, chopped
A handful of sultanas
A handful of pinenuts
A handful of chopped unsulphured apricots
A sprinkling of cumin

Then…
Boil the broad beans briskly for about five to ten minutes, drain, and park somewhere.  Sling rice, onions and cumin in a pan and add boiling water to cover the rice; bring back to the boil on the hob, put a lid on and switch off the power, and the residual heat should do the rest. Sling the rest of the ingredients – including the beans, because who would forget the beans? The beans which are part of the title? Not me – oh no – in for the last ten minutes or so before you eat, and there you go. The carrotty bit over the top of the rice goes really well, though Quercus tells me it’s lacking something. By which he means SAUSAGES.

(I’m spending a week cooking dinner from Cranks Fast Food by Nadine Abensur, because I’ve had the book for about eight years, and have only done the stuffed courgette recipe so far, because I find the writing style so off-putting, and, frankly, so deeply pretentious as to be quite toe-curling. Then there’s the fact taht every recipe in it seems to revolve around cumin, tabasco, tamari and something else that a delicatessen in Kensington might be able to order for you, but which your average supermarket probably hasn’t heard of. So, I thought I’d give it a bit of a blitz, to see if it’s worthy of its shelf room. So far, I like the recipes well enough, though I find myself changing ingredients here and there, and ignoring half of the method; the jury’s still out on its long-term residence here, though.

On the menu this week: stuffed courgettes; green beans, tomatoes and garlic; Boston baked beans; herby gnocchi (with a radically different sauce from the recipe one); something to do with pasta and, probably tabasco and cumin. Wish me luck… )

(Image courtesy of The Salty Spoon, because I have that very casserole dish, and because my camera, now six, is in the process of dying a slow and painful death; anyone got any recommendations for cameras which don’t break the bank?)

Gosh. It’s Monday. Again. How did that happen, when we have most definitely not just had a weekend?

Oh. Hang on. Just a minute.

Right you are.

So. There was a weekend; it just doesn’t feel as if there was. That would be because we all got up at something starting with a six on both Saturday and Sunday, and because Quercus has been pulling twelve-hour days working on landscaping the garden, aided by his – apparently indefatigable – mother, and because having people who are Not Us staying with us for ten days takes a toll, even if they are the loveliest souls you could imagine, and because teething is just plain horrid, and because sticky hot weather which is obviously in need of a damn good thunder storm is, well, sticky and hot.

Yes.

The division of labour referred to in the title has been giving me pause for thought recently. When Quercus and I bought our first house (well, OK, technically he bought it, and I did a PhD), we divided the work on it pretty equally. We both had a go at plastering, and at stripping walls, and at painting, and putting up shelves, and building desks, and replacing woodwork, and sorting out gardens, and marvelling at the utter tripe that passes for decorating in some houses. We both got covered in dust, and lost bits of fingernail while opening tins or ferreting about under floorboards. We both replaced sections of walls while remarking the bouncy nature of surrounding structures didn’t bode well, and we both organised quotes for things that required Teeth* larger than those we possessed at the time. (Those Teeth have now been taken out, and replaced with a giant set of chomping nashers which are unafraid of, well, virtually anything, in house terms, given that we’ve lived with acros propping up the external walls of the house, with no running water, with walls turning to dust or mud depending on the nature of the neglect they’d suffered.)

But since we’ve had the small girl, that division has changed. Firstly, while I was pregnant, we were cooking up not just a small girl, but also the plans for the extension with which we would replace the single-skin-brick ‘kitchen’ and ‘bathroom’ (I use these terms very loosely in this context…) which were here when we moved to the Earthenhouse. I was also finishing my PhD, and I can honestly say that, having thought all those claims regarding ‘pregnancy brain’ were just ridiculous females making excuses for their general state of dizziness, I WAS WRONG – I have never felt fuzzier in my life than I did when pregnant, and there came a point where it was all I could do to waddle through the work I need to get done on my thesis. The very thought of discussing extensions, planning applications and whatnot brought on palpitations, or, more often, a comatose state.

The old extension. Note buggered roof and frost on inside.

Because nothing says rural living like mouldy walls and fabric-like ceilings, right?

Why yes, since you ask: a tarp is absolutely an acceptable wall material.

Beginning to move into the new extension.

Note fairy lights, for where there are little lights, all is right with the world.

Men’s and Wimmin’s Work collides: bench saw and fermentation.

Just before this push on the garden.

Of course, we did talk about these things, because they were important, and needed decisions and whatnot, but I suppose that’s when the shift started.

And now, it’s largely Quercus who bears the brunt of the vast scale of the work our house needs to make it truly the home we want. (For now.) I have helped with things like lime rendering, and with dumper truck-driving, and with limewashing, and bathroom tiling, and various odds and sods like painting and sanding, but mostly, it’s been Quercus who’s out there slogging at it for horrible lengths of time, and it’s Quercus whose hands hurt from overuse of an SDS drill, or of a mixer, or of a breaker of some sort, and it’s Quercus who dropped the mixer on his leg yesterday because he’d been working too hard for too long, and I feel incredibly shifty.

Well, that’s the short version.

I spent the weekend with the small girl, doing things like sorting out the laundry, or making food, or attempting to cheer said girl up in the face of (we assume) molar machinations which rendered her mood less than upbeat. We made some felt balls on Saturday, and a sort of Anglo-Saxon felted crown on Sunday (all thanks to the very lovely Claire at Whispering Acres, who sent us a gorgeous assortment of goodies, including Kool-Aid, roving of all colours and textures, and even a book, about a month ago, and which we’re only just getting to grips with now). We made some bread (the quick recipe involving no kneading remains a favourite – seriously, ten minutes of actual input – all told – and just some time for it to rise and cook, and you’re done). We tried out a vegan version of Macaroni Cheese (which was lovely, and will definitely be added to the repertoire). We provided ice lollies when the heat was too much for the physical work needed on levelling the garden (which, at about four feet higher than the lane it abuts, was in dire need of some shoring-up if we were to avoid a not-that-small-given-the-size-of-the-lane mud-slide, and let’s not even get started on how much earth has been moved about the place in recent weeks).

The rational part of me knows that all these things need to happen, and that it makes sense that I am the person who makes them happen, because, well, first, Quercus is stronger than me, and fitter than me, and second, his mum actually chooses to do these things rather than looking after the small girl; I think that, while she loves her very clearly, she does find it tiring looking after her for five mornings a week, which is what she has been doing while we’re in this push of work on the house. So, when it gets to the weekend, she is quite glad to hand her back to me, and just help Quercus with things which most grandparents wouldn’t touch with a barge-pole – last night, for example, they were mixing up concrete at half-past eight, while I finished cooking dinner and sorting out the chaotic kitchen). At least some of my shiftiness is prompted by the sight of a sixty-something woman digging giant heaps of rubble out. It makes me feel like the very laziest of women to be floating about the place with the small girl, while everyone else seems to be doing Proper Work. It’s stupid, really, because, again, the rational part of me recognises and affirms the fact that looking after small people is a tremendous job, with huge responsibility and the potential to create either vast spaces of joy and fulfilledness or overwhelming depths of misery and discord, yet still there is this not-so-little voice telling me that I’m a shirker.

It doesn’t help, of course, that poor Quercus was up this morning at five, and was working with the digger by a quarter-past. Nor does it help that his hands are very achey at the moment, and he’s quite battered with various things which he’s hit or whacked or scratched or burnt in the couple of years, while I sit here proffering lotions and potions which only serve to make me more aware of the stark divide in our general daily tasks. I suppose it comes back to the familiar story: things traditionally viewed as Wimmin’s Work are not, by and large, valued as Work which will bear close comparison with Men’s Work. I am woman: hear me iron. Er…

I find that split deeply toe-curling, though. Quercus and I have always tended towards a reasonably ‘traditional’ (for want of a less loaded term) division, large-scale house renovation aside, in that I have always loved cooking, baking and generally attempting to create a feeling of home, while he genuinely enjoys such delights as chopping wood and digging potatoes. And I very much dislike the idea of a feminism which views these traditionally gendered activies – baking, making – as unworthy of card-holding feminists; rather, I embrace the recent trend in trying to change the way such activities are viewed, to reincorporate them into the overall picture of What It Is To Be Human, Never Mind Female, to show that such work is just as important as any other. I’m just having a hard time remembering to believe what I claim to know. Ya boo sucks to Traditional Gender Identities. Or something.

*Anyone who reads Blue Witch may be familiar with her Big Teeth; let’s hope that familiarity remains at a ‘by reputation only’ level – !

D’you know, I almost think I like Fridays better than either Sundays or Saturdays. Everything is still to come, and there is that vast vista of time, stretching out before you in a most appealing and luxurious manner. Friday feels virtuous in that I can make the extra effort, do that little bit more, in the certainty that tomorrow will be more relaxed, and a little bit more life-as-it-happens-orientated. We’re very lucky in the Earthenhouse: we still work part-time, the pair of us, so that we can spend lots of time with the small girl, and thus our mornings and afternoons move at a more relaxed and self-determined pace than can be found in many households, but still, of course, the pattern of work is ever-present, and means that one of the three of us must be in a certain place at a certain time. Not so on Saturday and Sunday, though, and that feeling of tiiiiiiiiime is a very lovely thing to behold.

This weekend, we have hired a three-tonne mini-digger and a dumper truck. With these, we are doing some fairly major work on our garden. This week, Quercus has taken down three corrugated iron sheds which dominated one side of the garden, breaking up the concrete bases as he went, as well as moving about three hundred bricks which we’re going to reuse from the old extension, and rediscovering the slabs which used to make up the old patio (and which we’re reusing this time around, but with a smaller patio so that we can also have paths made of decent slabs). So much stuff has gone to the metals merchant, too – an old bath, the old sheds, various bits of leftover pipe and even some bits we found kicking about in the earth.

The garden, while still chaotic, is at least clear of the various things which have just been sort of stored there for the last couple of years, which is nice, and we are just about to spend a couple of days shoving earth about the place to level out some of strangeness in the garden, as well as preparing for the wooden shed which Quercus will build to house all the tools and whatnot which we’ve acquired in the last few years. This shed will be smaller and prettier, and built, nearly exclusively, from reclaimed timber, a lot of which we salvaged from a house development in Exeter. It’s deeply smug-making to get things which people are throwing away and give them new life, to say nothing of the financial bonus of not having to shell out several hundred pounds on timber.

And you? Any plans for the weekend?

I can’t decide whether it’s just nostalgia or if I’m in danger of veering into rather morbid territory, but for some reason, ever since the immediate monumental crappitude of my mother dying had passed, I have found myself playing a small mental game about the ways in which my life, and the person I appear to be, would be recognisable to her.

This morning, I walked up a small Devonian lane, shutting the door of our house and stopping to look at our new door handle (which is of the brass beehive variety, and thus exceedingly pretty, to my mind) and the recently-cleaned foxy door knocker, to a car which is the next-to-current version of a car which Quercus drove when my mother was alive. Would our house be surprising to her? Yes, but only in that we are extraordinarily fortunate to have had it since we were twenty-six. Inside, I think she would be unsurprised, though delighted, by its hobbit-like nature. She would probably be surprised to see how practical we have become; she knew Quercus as a music student, not as wielder of chain, mitre and table saws.

I am wearing jeans (to work! horrors!), a sweater with the neck standing up against the gentle drizzle, and purple leather sandals, based on a pair I owned when she was alive. I am wearing silver spiral earrings given to me by Quercus the summer that my mother was diagnosed. I have a leather keyring which was my mother’s. I call to mind a day spent in Boscastle with her, before illness loomed on the horizon (in fact, just before, given that I’d already started university, so it must been the first time they came to visit; the return trip from that visit brought the road accident which started the process which would end in my mother dying of breast cancer, unrecognised until it was too late because her injuries masked the massing symptoms of her imminent doom. Gosh. That is still hard to write. And is it horribly wrong that even in the midst of this hardness, I note that this is a bit like the psychotic version of The House That Jack Built?), when the sun was shining and life was blissfully simple (though of course Sod’s Law being what it is, I didn’t realise this then, and I’m sure that I was full of teenage angst about something-or-other). We sat on a small wall together, and she said I looked like a pixie, a throw-away remark which I’ve often thought over since then, in moments when I contemplated a mirror which showed me a haggard vision of sleep-deprived bile.

In the car, an MP3 of David Bowie plays. This would definitely come as no surprise, and nor would the Jamiroquai I switch to later on.

My bag, which sports a fair-trade peacock on the outside, was probably not even designed, let alone in existence, when she died, but I don’t think its curly design would have failed to appeal, and nor would the felted purse lurking therein, rich in its bright spiral of colour but disappointingly underprivileged in fiscal terms. That probably wouldn’t surprise her, either.

In the back of the car, a small springy sheep lurches from the top of the window. Fastened to that bit you’re supposed to hang jackets on (who does that, incidentally?), he is there to distract the small girl when she’s imprisoned in her (German, which would also be no surprise to a woman who had a life-long affair with the Teutonic, and nearly married a German when she was eighteen) car-seat. She would not be surprised by the small girl; she it was who foresaw a ‘herd’ of small blonde children clinging to the legs of my dungarees. Not quite a herd, yet, but there’s still time.

As I get to work, a space I have inhabited for ten years in one form or another, I reflect that she’d probably be both surprised and pleased that I eschewed the London move which seemed the likely outcome for most of my sixth-form friends in favour of a life in which elderflower cordial-making goes hand-in-hand with lethal alcohol of unknown origin, rootled out of a hedge by friends, and with knackered cars which are constantly in danger of breaking down, and with a house of which gaffer tape has become an integral part. And with ancient clothes in danger of achieving listed status, and with stupidly uncommercial research projects, and with Quercus, and the small girl.

Strange though it may seem, this game is immensely comforting to me. My mother didn’t get to see my adult life, really, which had only just begun when she left, but she would feel a part of it, easily, inevitably, effortlessly, were she to reappear tomorrow, I think.

It’s been ages since I’ve had a working laptop, a spare half-hour, an internet connection, and the will to do something more active than staring at my navel for some time, but finally, that moment has arrived.

So, here is a quick round-up of the things we’ve been doing lately, which includes, of course, the small girl’s second birthday (June 1). I can’t believe my girl is two – it seems as if she has been a part – a defining characteristic – of my life always, yet at the same time, it’s but a blink of the eye since I was marvelling at the feel of her moving about inside me, watching the odd outline of, well, who knew what appearing against the side of my ever-expanding belly as she made herself that bit more comfortable.

We spent the week preceding her birthday at Quercus’s mother’s house, where the small girl enjoyed herself chasing about in a remarkably tidy garden while I sat beneath a copper beech tree and sewed things, including a dress (below) for the small girl made from dyed fabric we bought for table coverings at our wedding dance (I still have nearly a bolt of that fabric left) and various (slightly abortive) dresses for the doll I was making her for her birthday. (Ye gods, who knew that making dolls’ clothes would turn out to be such a dark art? I thought I was on the home strait when I managed to stitch on the doll’s head without putting it on back to front or something; let us not speak of the giant backside I created when I inadvertently over-stuffed the body section without realising that actually, all that spare fabric wasn’t spare, but was supposed to be the whole of the torso, not just the legs… Um…)

We arrived back in Devon, armed with a grandma who was going to help with both small person amusement and various delightful building-project-related tasks, to find that our absence had given Quercus the time to undercoat all the external woodwork, dig large trenches for drains to go around the outside of the house (we’re using this perforated pipe stuff which is supposed to take moisture away from the base of the cob walls; given that cob is just earth and straw, really, we don’t want to be adding too much water, as living in an earthen house is one thing, but no-one wants to live in a mud pie), fit guttering and downpipes to the extension, clean up the roof with a pressure washer (the lime got everywhere when we were rendering), re-hang the front door, sand it back to its original wooden state, fashion a small oak bed from the off-cuts left after building the kitchen cupboards for the small girl’s new doll AND clean the house virtually top to bottom. Many, many bonus points were awarded, needless to say.

Her birthday itself was wet, unfortunately, but we managed a nice little walk aboot, and there was much cake-eating (apple and vanilla, with lemon icing and two rather natty candles with little stars on them), present-opening and wrapping-paper-flinging. She is still getting used to having new things to play with; we tend to find that things are often put to one side for several weeks while one possession occupies pole position, and then later a regime shift takes place. Bluebell, the doll being tucked into Quercus’s oak bed here, has just come into her own after I caved and bought some gorgeous dolls’ clothes from the Bishopston Trading Company in Totnes (where I spent a very happy day ambling about with L-Q-S and her River Man, over from Ireland for a brief tour of various parts of England, including an as-usual lovely lunch in Willow, probably my favourite eatery ever); the clothes are exactly the right size, and are just as lovely as the full-size clothes the BTC churns out. Mostly, though, I am stupidly grateful that, for once, I bought something, and it just worked, and it didn’t need adjusting, replacing, returning or otherwise translating AT ALL. (Even if I have got just a slight hint of maternal guilt at not producing these things myself, all the while dandling the babe on one hip, weaving a few lentils into my own reusable sanitary towels and whistling the odd bar of all four parts of a Stravinsky string quartet).

Apart from this, the house is now once more a golden colour all over – part of the latest wave of Sorting Things Out included fixing the render caught by the hard frosts last January, and adding a coat of limewash. That coat needs to be wrapped in several more coats, and quite possibly hats, scarves, mittens and muffs, of limewash before we’ll be happy that it’s as weather-proof as it’s ever going to be, but hey, at least it’s a step in the right direction. The tricky thing is that we need dryish weather for limewashing, but not of the baking hot August-like variety we’re experiencing at the moment. It was twenty-five degrees this morning by ten o’clock. I mean, that seems a tad on the hardcore side to me, but then it’s well-known that I’d probably be happier living somewhere where ice proved a viable building product. (Blame it on having fair skin; it’s hard to get enthusiastic about weather which requires either the donning of something nice and sun-proof, like, say, A WARDROBE, or the frequent and lavish application of substances which greatly resemble axle grease. Oh, fair skin – why? WHY, I ask? English Rose? My arse. My family has Swedish roots, but that hasn’t helped my sodding skin tone, any more than my father’s black hair and olive skin did. Weedy little genes he must have, that’s all I can say.)

So. There you go. And you?

Quercus here again.

Well, that was quite a week! Many things have been fixed, or prepared, or done in some way. I had forgotten how everything takes 3 times as long as one thinks it might. I won’t list the rather long and tedious list of things that have changed, but think it fair to say that it’s been a productive week.

I think I should thank the Earthenwitch for actually upping and offing with the Witchling for a week, as it’s given me the opportunity to spend far more time than I would have done otherwise working on the chateau. I know that they have both been enjoying their time at Gwandma’s house (she is so called by the Witchling) and that they have had a chance to a) rest and b) visit ducks. Always a bonus. I have had a chance to lie in undisturbed this morning, which has been absolutely blissful. The week has seen me up at 5.30 and working til 7 or 8 in the evening; this comes of naturally being an early riser, I think. I do like the feeling of being outside stripping a door or something in brilliant sunshine, while everyone else is asleep. But today it was me who was asleep!

In other news, we are almost ready for the Witchling’s second birthday. Bless her, how can she be two?! I am sure pictures will be posted in due course of both beaming child and of presents. We have a couple of things we have made for her, and I’m particularly pleased with one of them. The other, from me, involved spending some time with a chainsaw in order to make it.

Right. Now I’d better toddle off to make the house look presentable again. Piles of tools in the middle of the kitchen – far simpler than putting them back in the shed every day. Can’t wait – I get my girlies back this afternoon!

Hello. Quercus here.

Well, now that I am all alone, or rather just accompanied by paws and claws, I have taken the liberty of hijacking the tiny white box to ramble about what’s happening here. It’s been very hot here, and spending all day outside has had a curious effect on my skin – I sensibly slathered myself in sun cream, but was unable to reach a section in the middle of my back, and forgot my legs altogether. The resultant blotches may take some time to fade. I have never been a very shirt-off type of person, but in this heat doing hard work all day it seemed like a good idea. Plus I thought the only beings around to see were the cats; Pyewacket turned up her nose in disgust and retired to the pile of sawdust under the chainsaw trestle, and Wixon is too stupid to form an opinion.

So far I have worked for three rather long days, getting up at 5.30 one day and working through until the light started to go. For my own reference and to make me feel good, I have so far broken up the concrete paths all round the house and moved them to the now even more enormous rubble pile outside the back door, despite the temptation to put it all on the Witchling’s newly -laid lawn, which would have been a damn sight more convenient, sanded the render off the porch woodwork, scraped, sanded and cleaned every window in our tiny house (all nine of them; this was actually rather a big deal as they were covered in render and I had to take all the casements out as I went, then reinstall them), cleaned and sanded the fascia / soffit boards, then painted them, dug out a gatepost which was a devil of a job, and started putting guttering up.

Gosh, I’m boring, aren’t I?! Possibly the most irritating bit of it was this morning, when I painted the fascia / soffit boards. Usually the Earthenwitch does painting, particularly when it’s fiddly bits, as she is better at it than I, but I had to do it this time as it had to be finished before the guttering went up. I had primered it the day before, so this morning hoped to do the first of two top coats. We had coughed up our life savings and plumped for a Farrow & Ball number called Railings, in exterior eggshell (well actually the Earthenwitch had sat on me while reading my debit card number out to the nice man on the telephone, leaving me gasping for air and for reeling from the realisation that I had just spent £48.50 [that's a lot of dollars, for our American readers] on 2.5 litres of gunky dark paint; Messrs. Farrow & Ball must be laughing all the way to their extraordinarily large piggy bank), and I had just begun to apply it, up at the top of a very tall and wobbly stepladder, when a bloke appeared round the side of the house. I came down, and he explained that he was a tree chopping chap doing the rounds for the electricity company, and that one of the poles in our garden had about 6m more ivy on it than was allowed. I was delighted that he was prepared to hack it about instead of me, so after a pleasant conversation about wood which they might chop and I might collect, I went back to my painting. The Farrow and Ball had grown a skin. It was OK though, as I stirred it back in. I went back up the teetering ladder and continued. Almost immediately our neighbour appeared, along with two year-old boy and aged hound, who proceeded to make his way indoors to polish off Wixon’s breakfast (much to his horror). They chatted for a minute, then disappeared just as another neighbour, who is an electrician, dropped by to talk to me about some work we need doing. The skin was forming again. I continued, only to be halted five minutes later by a delivery van with bits of house for me, and then again two minutes later by the neighbour / boy / dog, passing the other way. The last straw was when a building supplies lorry turned up with more stuff for us, and I had to pause to direct the chap craning sand over the hedge. Mind you, he was my favourite driver – an animated Italian, who gesticulates wildly and talks almost incomprehensibly while beaming in glee at everything you say.

In the end the Farrow & Balls-up went alright, but took a lot longer than expected.

I have to say it’s very strange to be here on my own. I don’t really like it, although the heavenly bliss of uninterrupted nights (even if I do get up obscenely early) is enjoyable. But I miss my baby. Where is the little voice that demands “pruuuune” at the end of breakfast? Where are the tiny feet that run around upstairs? Where is the little bare naked baby who runs away at bath-time? And where is my garden helper? I miss her enormously. Oh, and I miss the Eathenwitch a bit too.

Right – I’m off for tea. Pizza again (gave up bacon sandwiches after eating nothing else for a day and a bit, and then being very sick; too much salt). Cheerio.

I’m off to West Sussex for a week, with the small girl. We’re abandoning Quercus to his fate, which is to work on the house and finish various things off, in favour of an extra pair of hands to entertain personages of a diminutive stature (his mum), in favour of tidy gardens with sprinkler systems which are just asking to be played with, in favour of growing tomatoes in need of pollination help in the form of being rattled about each day, in favour of SOMEONE ELSE DOING THE COOKING. In short, it’s a sort-of holiday which gives Quercus the space to work without worrying that he’s causing utter chaos for the rest of us.

Other things: sourdough bread. Well. The small girl and I used Hugh F-W’s recipe, and though we followed it to the letter, I was surprised that the resulting loaf wasn’t more… well, different. Admittedly, given that I wasn’t using organic flour because I hadn’t got any, I did end up having to boost the starter with a scrap of yeast – could that be why, to all intents and purposes, it seemed an awful lot like, well, normal (in a homemade context) bread? I’d love to give it another go, as I hear all sorts of good things about sourdough, and so far, while it was nice, it wasn’t exactly the revelation I’d hoped for. Suggestions? Recipes? Pointers? In the meantime, I’ve been making that spelt recipe I posted a while back quite a lot – the only problem I have found with it is that, I think because of the ratio of water to flour, the top tends to flatten off during baking; I need to fine-tune quantities and rise time, I think, but the crumpetty texture is intriguingly beguiling. Crumpbread. I mean – !

Still other things: it’s the small girl’s birthday in a little over a week. She will be two on the first of June, and I have no idea quite where that time has gone. Last week, she cracked (if that’s the right verb) her first pun – a small fish finger-puppet was stuffed down her dungarees while an enormous grin formed on her face, and she then said, giggling so much that it took me a minute to work out what she was on about, ‘fish it out! fish it out!’. She is increasingly chatty, day by day; a friend told me that a two-and-a-half-year NHS check-up includes the questiof of whether a child has a vocabulary of c. 200 words – I should say that the small girl’s vocabulary now extends to something like 500 words easily. She speaks in phrases of up to about six or seven words, and often offers words I didn’t know she knew. Her company is a delight in so many ways, and we are having tremendous fun together, more-so than I’d ever imagined possible at this point. I’ve been making a few things for her birthday – so far, a small mattress, with washable quilt and pillow covers to go on a little wooden bed which Quercus is making for her various soft toys, and a set of napkins with a table cloth to supplement the tin tea-set we’ve bought her – and this week, while I have the unusual luxury of childcare in the form of the much-loved Grandma, I’m going to try my hand at making a Waldorf doll. I’ve never done this sort of thing before, but I’ve armed myself with various supplies, internet tutorials and ‘The Children’s Year’, which I read about here and couldn’t resist, so keep your fingers crossed that I don’t mangle it too badly, and if the results aren’t too horribly unexpected, I may even go so far as to post a picture.

I still have a birthday crown to make, using up some felt I’ve had kicking about for aaaages, and hopefully I’ll get through that in the coming week as well. Oh, and possibly some trousers for the small girl, and a summer dress, given that we are having improbably summer-like weather (I won’t go so far as to say that it is now summer, as this is Devon, which is in England, which makes really virtually any mention of the s-word the kiss of death in terms of ongoing, settled warmth without some hideous drawback, like rampant humidity or thunder or some-such appealing meteorological phenomena). Let’s hope the sewing machine continues its current mild manners, or the small girl’s vocabulary may be subjected to some developments I would rather postpone until at least, say, three.

Other, other things (ahem): the orchards which surround Earthenhouse are in blossom, and it’s a real sight to behold. Acres of careful rows of little stumpy cider apple trees, all weighed down with millions of dusky pink flowers, and humming with bees (some of whom live in hives at the back of the fields). The small girl and I rather like walking between the rows, surrounded by the busyness of said bees and the fragrance of the trees. The best bit, of course, is when Pyewacket and Wixon come with us too – other people walk dogs, but not us: we have walking cats.

(Since you ask, which you probably didn’t, the bonnet is made from a scrap of Kaffe Fassett’s lovely ‘Roman Glass’ fabric, because it is just tooooooo good. The colours! The circles! The – *passes out*)

I leave you with news that the caravan has finally departed the parish, after nearly a year of worrying, chivvying and general bollocking about with both its owner and the one-time friend who arranged its appearance here. We are not missing it, unsurprisingly, and I am still boggling at the situation, to say nothing of the fact that we still have a few things belonging to the one-time friend which, I imagine, he may at some point want back, but which he (apparently) can’t be arsed to come and get now. Irritating, but not eight foot by twenty, so surmountable, in the general scale of things.

Right. See you all on the other side, and have a lovely week.